Shirley Hazzard Quotations

For most people it's easier to support an eminent person in deserved disgrace than an obscure one who has been wronged.

Perhaps if we lived with less physical beauty we would develop our true natures more.

I have a superstition that if I talk about plot, it's like letting sand out of a hole in the bottom of a bag.

A poet or novelist will invent interruptions to avoid long consecutive days at the ordained page; and of these the most pernicious are other kinds of writing -- articles, lectures, reviews, a wide correspondence.

It is the impulse of our century, with its nearly religious belief in magnitude, to fling an institution into every void.

Madness might sometimes give access to a kind of knowledge. But was not a guarantee.

That was the trouble with experience; it taught you that most people were capable of anything, so that loyalty was never quite on firm ground -- or, rather, became a matter of pardoning offenses instead of denying their existence.

The sweetness that all longed for night and day. Some tragedy might be idly guessed at-loss or illness. She had the luminosity of those about to die.

Americans' great and secret fear is that America may turn out to be a phenomenon rather than a civilization.

Sometimes, surely, truth is closer to imagination or to intelligence, to love than to fact? To be accurate is not to be right.